Partisan Gardens
Education Podcasts
On Partisan Gardens, we know climate catastrophe is here, and it’s our food system’s dead end. Here we see sustainable fine dining and ecological destruction, hunger and obesity, extreme wealth and immense poverty. We can’t wait any longer — for a tech breakthrough, climate apocalypse, the revolution, or a reform of the USDA loan system. We must be frank about reality, to reckon with our options. We must choose sides, and become partisans of a new way to live and grow food.
Location:
United States
Genres:
Education Podcasts
Description:
On Partisan Gardens, we know climate catastrophe is here, and it’s our food system’s dead end. Here we see sustainable fine dining and ecological destruction, hunger and obesity, extreme wealth and immense poverty. We can’t wait any longer — for a tech breakthrough, climate apocalypse, the revolution, or a reform of the USDA loan system. We must be frank about reality, to reckon with our options. We must choose sides, and become partisans of a new way to live and grow food.
Twitter:
@PartisanGardens
Language:
English
Website:
http://www.partisangardens.org/
Email:
partisangardens@wfhb.org
Episodes
April 2023 | Brown Water Utopia
4/26/2023
In this episode of Partisan Gardens, we explore the competing utopias at stake in the struggle to stop Cop City in Atlanta. Cop City is itself a grim utopia, a vision concocted by cops and politicians of a depopulated, fake city that will actually bend to their will. On the other side are the diverse...
Duration:01:00:59
October 2022: The State Monopoly on Hunger with Hannah Kass
11/7/2022
This month on Partisan Gardens, we interviewed Hannah Kass, a food systems researcher and graduate student at University of Wisconsin – Madison. Kass recently published an article in the Journal of Peasant Studies that aimed to extend radical critiques of contemporary food systems and efforts to reform them. The article, “Food anarchy and the State...
Duration:00:58:59
August 2022 | A Foot in Both Worlds
9/1/2022
For this episode, we share a candid and generative conversation between Kay and Sarah, shortly after World’s End, Sarah’s farm, hosted a week long group retreat. They share reflections on that experience, and the role of farms in hosting urban visitors. They touch on the strange idea of owning the land, reflecting on the concept...
Duration:00:59:00
July 2022 | Learning From Bioregionalism, Part Two
7/27/2022
For this episode, we finish sharing an ambitious two-part interview with Doug, a life-long deserter, commune-dweller, and bioregionalist organizer currently living in western Canada. Doug is interviewed by his nephew, a contributor to a militant network of communes in the region. Doug continues to share invaluable recollections on the experience of living underground and in...
Duration:00:55:10
June 2022 | Learning From Bioregionalism
6/30/2022
This month, we begin sharing an ambitious two-part interview with Doug, a life-long deserter, commune-dweller, and bioregionalist organizer currently living in western Canada. Doug is interviewed by his nephew, a contributor to a militant network of communes in the region. Doug shares invaluable recollections on the experience of living underground and in exile in Canada...
Duration:00:59:00
May 2022 | The Neighborhood Planting Project
5/26/2022
Earlier this spring, people across the eastern half of the US organized neighborhood planting projects in order to widely distribute and plant food-bearing trees. Their motivations are diverse, and we’ll hear from a range of them in this episode, but these tree-planters are often hoping to build a more verdant, autonomous, resilient, common life in...
Duration:00:58:59
April 2022 | The 2022 Earthbound Farmers Almanac
4/29/2022
This month’s Partisan Gardens is all about the Farmer’s Almanac, specifically the 2022 Earthbound Farmer’s Almanac. Our listeners are probably familiar with the old farmer’s almanac, with its planting charts, weather forecasts and random tidbits of folksy wisdom and jokes. It’s an artifact of an earlier time, probably not the first place our listeners go...
Duration:00:59:00
March 2022 | The Grain Problem — Russian Agriculture and the Impact of War
3/30/2022
This month, we spoke to Susanne Wengle, a professor at Notre Dame who researches post-Soviet political and economic transformation in Russia. Her second book is Black Earth, White Bread; a Technopolitical History of Russian Agriculture and Food. We were eager to hear her perspective on the history of agriculture in Russia and Ukraine and the current war’s ripple effects...
Duration:00:57:12
February 2022 | RetroSuburbia with David Holmgren
2/24/2022
This month, we’re excited to share our conversation with David Holmgren, author of the recent RetroSuburbia and co-author of the landmark 1978 book, Permaculture One, with Bill Mollison, which launched the international permaculture movement. Drawing on permaculture principles of recognizing existing patterns and incorporating them into design, Holmgren is calling for a bold and improvisational approach to the...
Duration:00:58:57
January 2022 | The Farmworker Caravan
1/28/2022
For this episode of Partisan Gardens, we learn about the conditions facing migrant farm workers in California. We share a two conversations: one between Partisan Gardens and Nikola Garcia, author of a recent article in Inhabit: Territories called “The Farmworker Caravan: Mutual Aid in California’s Migrant Worker Communities.” The other is a conversation between Nikola and Darlene...
Duration:00:58:55
December 2021 | Beyond the Banana Plantation
12/29/2021
This month, Partisan Gardens is all about the banana. Second only to the tomato as the most consumed fruit in the world, the banana has thus far only been made available in temperate regions through a violent extraction process led by multinational corporations. Attacks against this colonial system likely began at least as early as...
Duration:00:58:54
November 2021 | Putting Food By, with Sandor Katz
11/23/2021
On this autumn episode of Partisan Gardens, we’re sharing skills for preserving our harvests and thoughts on the significance of food preservation and food sovereignty. First, Ren, a local grower, speaks with Tom, who has launched a biodiverse and integrated homestead in the Adirondacks. Tom discusses the variety of ways that they’ve learned to preserve...
Duration:00:58:55
October 2021 | Cultivating Communal Luxury
10/27/2021
This month on Partisan Gardens, we are sharing a presentation by Kristin Ross, author of the landmark book “Communal Luxury: the Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune.” She delivered the lecture to the 2019 Antipode American Association of Geographers Lecture in Washington DC and gave another version of the talk here in Bloomington that same...
Duration:00:58:32
September 2021 | The Oikos Vision For Tree Crops
9/30/2021
For our episode this month, we spoke with Ken Asmus, the founder of Oikos Nursery. From 1982 till earlier this year, Oikos was one of the most important sources of rare fruit trees and other non-commercial perennial food plants. Ken recently retired from the nursery business in order to better pursue his research into food-bearing plants...
Duration:00:58:59
August 2021 | Urban Farming on Chicago’s South Side
8/30/2021
For this episode, we interviewed urban farmers across Chicago, along with a mutual aid organization that stocks its sidewalk fridges with fresh produce from some of these same farms. Their work is not only meeting urgent needs, but is helping to sketch out a horizon for another kind of life, grown inside the shell of...
Duration:01:45:22
July 2021 | Capital Flees: Union Busting at a Vegan Foods Factory
7/21/2021
This week, we speak with a group of grassroots labor organizers formerly employed at No Evil Foods, a socialist-themed vegan foods company. They describe their efforts to organize a union at the company’s Asheville manufacturing plant, and No Evil’s subsequent efforts to bust the union – leveraging the COVID crisis – and eventually outsource their work in order to close...
Duration:01:06:44
June 2021 | The Earthbound Farmer’s Almanac
6/23/2021
This month’s Partisan Gardens is all about the Farmer’s Almanac, specifically the 2021 Earthbound Farmer’s Almanac. Our listeners are probably familiar with the old farmer’s almanac, with its planting charts, weather forecasts and random tidbits of folksy wisdom and jokes. It’s an artifact of an earlier time, probably not the first place our listeners go...
Duration:01:56:47
May 2021 | Building Food Sovereignty
5/26/2021
For today’s episode, we spoke with Antonio Roman-Alcala and Spirit Mike. In 2011, Antonio released the powerful documentary In Search of Good Food, which carefully traced the crises built into the food systems in California’s Central Valley, which is the source of most vegetable and many tree crops across the US. Antonio reflected on the film and...
Duration:01:47:21
April 2021 | The Dystopic and Exceptional Pawpaw
4/24/2021
The pawpaw is an incredible, temperate, semi-forgotten fruit. It’s existence is a real exception on many levels: it is the only member of a tropical genus to survive this far north in most of the continent; it is nutrient and protein rich beyond most fruit; and pawpaws are exceptionally fragile, pushing them outside of economic...
Duration:01:09:17
March 2021 | Food Insecurity and Collective Care
3/16/2021
The global pandemic has exacerbated an already-simmering crisis of food insecurity, itself rooted in growing populations pushed outside of formal labor markets. This exclusion, often implemented along racial lines, leads to precarity and a struggle for survival, which has only grown more bleak with the pressures of COVID-19. The economy simply cannot produce enough jobs,...
Duration:02:20:53